AT&T lawyer stopped Plan 9 release CD with songs by Lou Reed, Debbie Harry

https://www.tuhs.org/mailman3/hyperkitty/list/tuhs@tuhs.org/message/H2XN5ONL3XAAUFVERXNYKS7QOZAOGBFA/

by asjo • 4 years ago

439 177 4 years ago

nailer• 4 years ago

There was also VQF from Yamaha, people seriously had discussions on whether MP3 or VQF would become the dominant format.

Oh also Fraunhofer uploaded the mp3 source to the ISO website for years with no license, let the community build on it for years (I feel like they knew) and then asked everyone for a minimum of 10K USD.

bitwize• 4 years ago

Even Bill Gates knows you let people pirate the product first, then squeeze them for license fees.

RajT88• 4 years ago

VQF was indeed better. Smaller files, same fidelity.

I cannot remember all of them now, but there was a few like that.

kybernetyk• 4 years ago

Fun fact: Apple's CoreAudio to this day can't output MP3. It can read it fine just not write it. :)

astrange• 4 years ago

The iTunes MP3 encoder is really bad, so nobody should want it to.

jonahx2• 4 years ago

I feel like part of the story is missing, or I am missing something... why couldn't they just confirm the releases?

blihp• 4 years ago

The lawyer didn't care... they just used their power to block the release. Since it wasn't something that mattered to them, they likely never gave it a second thought. This isn't terribly uncommon (it's not just an issue with lawyers, but with any corporate gatekeeper) in the business world.

jonahx2• 4 years ago

So there was no mechanism to appeal the decision, presumably? Lawyer says "nope", gives bullshit reason, and that's it? Nothing further to be done?

anigbrowl2• 4 years ago

Yeah I am doubting this too. The lawyer identifies a potential legal problem (clearances) that would have been trivial to solve. For about $50 you can file a copyrighted work with the librarian of Congress and get an officially USA-branded certificate of copyright ownership, and it only takes a couple of weeks. This is a norm in the creative industry because if you have filed your copyrighted work and it is later infringed, you can claim punitive damages as well as recoup your loss.

morcheeba• 4 years ago

I read it as not a clearance problem, but that the lawyer didn't know who Lou Reed and Debbie Harry were and didn't want to release music from some randos the developers had found.

Isamu• 4 years ago

I don’t think you have experienced the politics of high level executives in mega corporations. This is exactly the most plausible part of the story. Some legal executive likely jumped to some conclusion before talking to Rob to get all the facts, and didn’t want to walk back his position because he is so much more important than the tiny Unix group that it was easier to just kill it.

Remember Plan9 was not going to make money enough for any executive to care.

anarchy89• 4 years ago

Anyone know what the file format they used was?

pdw• 4 years ago

It must have been an early version of AAC. Bell was involved with that. And another message in the thread claims "the early versions of the audio compression stuff were not quite is good as the later versions (which became apples stuff)"

Maursault• 4 years ago

Regarding the early formats' fidelity, the defense Napster should have won with was that the plaintiff's assumption that digital copies were any good was false. The mp3s in question were barely broadcast quality, thus sharing low bitrate mp3 was not any different from sharing recordings of broadcast radio, a legal activity.

MisterTea• 4 years ago

PAC - Perceptual Audio Coder

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perceptual_Audio_Coder

https://marc.info/?l=9fans&m=111558697616455&w=2

tkhattra• 4 years ago

see this 1995 Wired interview with ken thompson - https://www.wired.com/1995/08/thompson-4/.

overeater• 4 years ago

This stories reminds me of the times before tech dominance, when programmers and innovators needed to get permission to do almost anything. Tech people were not allowed to run companies, or even manage people -- you needed MBAs for that.

Anything "disruptive" would be immediately shut down and threatened from the dominant industry. Anti-societal violence in video games were under constant protest (like the original Grand Theft Auto, or Mortal Kombat), and don't even think about trying to start a business like Uber or Spotify.

New file formats could be immediately crushed by IP concerns. Even web pages posting content about circumventing current systems or linking to sites like that were targeted. If you weren't a big player, you didn't have any way to accept money (besides asking people to mail you checks).

While tech is seen as too powerful now, I think it's at least nice that we no longer have the anxiety that plagued any idea or project in the past. You don't have to worry about going to jail for programming crypto code, or be unable to find a hosting provider for your website that shows scraped public data.

justinclift• 4 years ago

we no longer have the anxiety that plagued any idea or project in the past.

_cough_ Patents _cough_.

WalterBright22• 4 years ago

When I developed the first native C++ compiler around 1987, I thought I'd better check with AT&T's lawyers if I could:

1. sell a C++ compiler

2. call it C++

Their lawyer was very nice, and said sure. He also laughed and said he appreciated that I was the only one who bothered to ask.

effingwewt3• 4 years ago

Still boggles my mind reading things like this- so cool to hear origin stories from the horse's mouth, so to speak. But if he hadn't been nice what would have happened?

I'm sad to imagine the future we are headed towards where only new technologies are worked on, just to get the patents and sit on them, while everything pre-existing is deprecated and abandoned. Microsoft's embrace extend extinguish works eerily well.

Do you think we are headed in a better direction now? Or is it simply different?

I remember working with ATT in the late 90's when it was ATT broadband. They were still using green screen computer terminal windows for everything and were trying to get a GUI off the ground. Everything was alt and tab to switch windows etc, no mouse support! Into the mid 2000's! This was done by getting regular employees to try and cobble something together. The miraculous thing was that they pulled it off. Just took them a few years longer than it should have. ATT 'corporate' was known for being every bit the tv trope of a big business back then.

I remember seeing early builds and laughing it was so bad. ATT in particular was very much stuck in its ways as a corporation and was not inclined to change even the most broken of things.

When it finally rolled out it was such a mess. All the IT people could do was wince. Everyone but the people who mattered saw it coming. They hired some firm to re-do it all. That happened who knows how many times within just a few years after that. Went from refusing to update to doing it constantly and always breaking things.

I must say it was pretty insane watching $12k long distance bills from calls to, for instance India, get re-rated to several dollars.

Wondered how accurate the accounting could possibly be with so many inaccurate and fungible dollar amounts floating around.

Edit to add- years later I was working as an HVAC service technician and had to do some work at cell phone towers, server locations (wasn't really server farms back then), and phone agent locations for all cell phone carriers in Albuquerque, NM.

It felt surreal to see bow fast and far the companies had gotten in only a few short years. Companies (especially ATT) that couldn't figure out basic things about computers were at the cutting edge of like all the technology they used. ACs were top of the line Lieberts, they had all proprietary software on everything. The super remote cell phone towers had AC, power, storage, and communications redundancy. Their security had been beefed up to top tier. Contractors all needed top tier security clearance now.

I don't know if it was the Kevin Mitnick generation of phone phreaks, hackers, and social engineering, or the world in general, or a change in CEO but it was kind of like watching the titanic become some super-advanced space-faring time-warping ship.

That had kinda given me hope that- damn, maybe we can enter the new age jumping in with both feet. As a kid it felt like progress had been so slow!

dekhn2• 4 years ago

One of my favorite tech books is 'The Idea Factory' which covers various periods of innovation at (AT&T) Bell Labs, including the creation of the first real cell phone technology.

When I first got Pacific Bell (now part of AT&T) DSL in California in the early 2000s, it was run by a seperate division of the company, "Emerging Products Division". i always assumed that was because the traditional side of PacBell just didn't get digital at all and the leadership kept them apart to avoid the innovator's dilemma.

WalterBright22• 4 years ago

But if he hadn't been nice what would have happened?

I would have tried to negotiate a deal. If that failed, I would have abandoned making a C++ compiler.

Consider that at the time C++ and ObjectiveC were neck and neck, judging by the message volume on newnews. I rejected doing O-C because Stepstone demanded royalties for implementing it.

When Zortech C++ was released, an inexpensive native C++ compiler that was well-adapted to the 16 bit DOS model, C++ took off, and O-C sputtered and died. If AT&T had also demanded royalties, C++ would have been a failure, as cfront was not very practical.

90% of programming in those days was done on DOS, and Zortech C++ was top of the heap. If I may say so, Zortech C++ gave C++ the critical mass it needed to surge ahead.

My partner made the mistake of telling Eugene Wang of Borland how well ZTC++ was selling, and from the look on Eugene's face I knew we'd made a big mistake. Borland did an abrupt change in direction and went all in on Turbo C++. And the rest, as they say, is history. Microsoft also soon abandoned its object extensions to C and went with C++.

foobarian2• 4 years ago

What do you mean by "trying to get a GUI off the ground?" Was it that ATT corp IT was trying to deploy a windowing OS onto employees' computers? Or that they were developing a graphical OS a la Plan9 and failing?

WalterBright22• 4 years ago

P.S. Bjarne Stroustrup and especially Andrew Koenig were super nice and supportive of my efforts in those days. The nascent C++ community was very welcoming.

jacquesm6• 4 years ago

And yours was a huge improvement over 'cfront'!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cfront

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_Mars

Did you get into trouble because of the Zorland joke?

cgriswald• 4 years ago

In the early internet days, when I was young and learning HTML, the book I used to learn recommended asking permission to link to a website. I thought that was weird, but I was a rule follower then. So I, a kid, sent a message to the 'webmaster' of a local government site and dutifully asked permission to link to their home page.

The said no.

If I'm ever a super-villain, I'm using this as my origin story.

WalterBright22• 4 years ago

On the other hand, I've consistently found you can often get what you want just by asking for it. A lot of people seem unwilling to do this.

jhgb2• 4 years ago

the book I used to learn recommended asking permission to link to a website. I thought that was weird

You thought correctly. You should have read a book written by someone smarter. Imagine a world where you'd have to ask book writers if you're allowed to cite or to refer to their books in yours.

donarb• 4 years ago

I recall that Microsoft's Visual C++ user license had a clause that forbid you from creating a C++ compiler with it.

eschneider• 4 years ago

I believe that was for your protection.

bluedino• 4 years ago

Sounds like a challenge

WalterBright22• 4 years ago

More sales for Zortech C++!

MaxBarraclough• 4 years ago

Not a silly question at all, though. The situation isn't the same with Java, where expensive approval is needed before you can call your solution a JVM.

The Kaffe VM, for instance, is careful to show a disclaimer: technically, Kaffe is not Java. [0][1]

[0] http://www.kaffe.org/

[1] https://softwareengineering.stackexchange.com/a/433377/

jhgb2• 4 years ago

I was the only one who bothered to ask.

Was it necessary to ask? Unless C++ is patented and you live in a place where software patents are actually a thing, what could prevent you from writing your own implementation of something?

WalterBright22• 4 years ago

I had no idea what IP rights AT&T held over it. There was no way I was going to invest blood, sweat, and tears in developing a C++ compiler only to get sued over it.

Besides, it was polite to ask.

benjamoon• 4 years ago

I didn’t do anything as amazing as you did, but in about 1999 I made a website with a nav menu “inspired” by the then current Microsoft website nav (it was all vbscript dhtml and I basically copy and pasted it from the ms site). I emailed them to check it was ok to copy their nav (it wasn’t even a commercial project so I don’t know why I was so polite), but they replied and they were really nice. They said they encourage “engineers” to create new things rather than copy, but anything I needed from their site I could take and then a load of links to dhtml resources in case I wanted to build my own. I wonder if you did that now would you just get a response from their legal team?

rkuykendall-com• 4 years ago

One of the first things I ever did with significant complexity in HTML was stealing the Apple.com Nav bar. When you're just starting out, that is a challenge all it's own!

AlbertCory4• 4 years ago

People questioning whether the lawyer really had the power to block this don't know how legal departments in big corporations work, as others have pointed out.

A lawyer usually cannot get in trouble for saying No. They can only get in trouble for saying Yes. They feel they're doing their jobs by saying No and they'll also use the phrase "out of an abundance of caution."

The lawyer's supervisor is very rarely going to overrule him or her and say Yes. They will just say "it's their case, they're in charge." They defer to each other that way.

This probably seems excessively cynical to you. Indeed it doesn't always turn out this way. Sometimes rationality prevails.

duxup• 4 years ago

The few times I was involved in “we should ask legal” situations and it wasn’t the most obvious yes… I just checked out after that as some legal drone always came back with some “no” and sometimes some really wonky situations they made up that frankly read more like some random internet legal expert rather than someone with training.

AlbertCory4• 4 years ago

Yes, indeed. I could tell a great story, but just doing that would itself violate a No some lawyer gave me.

tgv• 4 years ago

It's called liability, isn't it? Lawyers only go out of their way to rationalize something when it's deemed profitable.

pmoriarty• 4 years ago

The question that should be asked is not "can we do this?" but "what do we need to do to make this happen?"

s3ctor8• 4 years ago

This holds true for a number of situations where approval is required. For me it's particularly helpful when looking for IT/Information Security approval. "What actions/precautions do you recommend I take, so that you will approve this when you are asked to (and we are implementing a secure solution)?"

tlrobinson• 4 years ago

I’ve found good corporate lawyers will summarize the risks of taking some action and ask you (or higher up leadership) to weight those against the business case for taking said action.

dekhn2• 4 years ago

Agreed, I worked with some very good lawyers at Google who understood the technical details and the context outside of corporate/industry. It wasn't always default 'no', especially if you knew how to ask the questions properly. It was default 'maybe and here's why'.

CWuestefeld• 4 years ago

Agreed. When I deal with our legal counsel, I often try to draw him out to determine how I need to prioritize my team's work. Generally he declines to give me any firm yes or no, and just tells me where he sees risks.

dctoedt• 4 years ago

A lawyer usually cannot get in trouble for saying No. They can only get in trouble for saying Yes.

This. AND: There's seldom if ever much near-term personal upside for the lawyer, just downside if things go wrong --- and lawyers are a natural target for business people to point the fingers at if things do go wrong, because they're of different tribes.

Warren Buffett's longtime business partner Charlie Munger famously said, "Never a year passes but I get some surprise that pushes a little further my appreciation of incentive superpower. * * * Never, ever, think about something else when you should be thinking about the power of incentives." [0]

That said, good business lawyers think of themselves as kinda being business people with legal training, assessing all the relevant risks and making recommendations for the business. (I tell my students: Try to think as though you were the CEO — but remember that you're not.)

https://perma.cc/LNG7-JG6Y.

userbinator• 4 years ago

Hence why the phrase "it's easier to ask for forgiveness than permission" exists.

FunnyBadger• 4 years ago

Also it's NOT corporate legal that makes ANY decisions - that's reserved for management hierarchy - legal is merely advisory to management and NOTHING MORE.

Beldin• 4 years ago

That comment about the stack of CDs mysteriously disappearing right from under the presenter's nose while he kept on fiddling with his slides is hilarious.

sovietswag• 4 years ago

lol "the presenter".... who was Ken Thompson

wiredfool• 4 years ago

Would you trust one of those CDs?

ineedasername3• 4 years ago

I asked a (great) boss I had once if we should get the legal department's opinion on something very minor. They had a great response, which was that nothing-- unless absolutely necessary by policy or significant risk-- should ever be given to them unless we wanted to wait 6 months for them to tell us "no".

YMMV based on the nature of issues your legal folks have to deal with on a regular basis. In our case, anything outside of standard contract review they had a reputation of being a nightmare to deal with.

mynameishere• 4 years ago

The legal department is useful if your boss wanted to scuttle something.

https://dilbert.com/strip/1993-01-31

iasay• 4 years ago

That sounds like our purchasing department. AWS always gets business first now because we don’t have to raise a PO

bombcar3• 4 years ago

And now you know how AWS works and makes their money.

boondaburrah• 4 years ago

similarly, webapps have eaten desktop software because you don't have to raise a ticket with IT to get approval for a software install.

james_in_the_uk3• 4 years ago

If you are doing something that isn't significantly risky and isn't identified by policy as likely to give rise to a significant risk, then you don't need to ask a company lawyer.

If you ask them anyway, it might take a while to get a reply, because they'll be prioritising significant risks.

ellyagg• 4 years ago

But then they also say no.

ineedasername3• 4 years ago

There are plenty of things short of significant risk that would be useful to have a professional legal opinion on.

You are also making the faulty assumption that policy has sufficient coverage to avoid ambiguities and cover all events. It doesn't. Something not particularly risky, not covered by policy, but touching on a legal matter are not uncommon.

Your comment is rather strange in fact given the actual linked article's example.

Bayart• 4 years ago

I wish I was as cool as Rob Pike.

indrora• 4 years ago

You really don't.

Having experienced him, he's kindof an asshole. Smart, but with the tact un an unpleasant rash.

dagurp• 4 years ago

What's plan 9?

msla• 4 years ago

The OS the people who created Unix did after they'd decided that networked workstations with high-resolution graphics displays and mice were the way the future would look. In some ways, it's a cleaned-up Unix, and in others, it's a different design, based more around computers on a LAN sharing resources than than terminals connecting to a central system.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plan_9_from_Bell_Labs

masswerk• 4 years ago

Kudos for providing an answer (also a very good short answer) instead of simply downvoting a question!

nobody9999• 4 years ago

What's plan 9?

The sibling comment gave a good answer.

But don't take their word (or Wikipedia's, for that matter) for it.

Go ahead and install[0] it yourself.

I'd recommend a VM.

[0] https://plan9.io/plan9/

drybjed• 4 years ago

You can also watch an excellent series of videos[1] from the adventuresin9[2] YouTube channel, showcasing the Plan 9 system itself (based on 9front fork) and its capabilities.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC7qFfPYl0t8Cq7auyblZqxA/vid...

[2] https://youtube.com/adventuresin9

jacquesm6• 4 years ago

In a nutshell: an iterative improvement on the UNIX concept of everything is a file. In UNIX everything is a file unless it isn't (a device, for instance, which just looks like a file but does not behave as such), in plan 9 that is so cleanly implemented that you can run one window manager inside another (and if you want while using the CPU resources of yet another machine) without losing stride.

dredmorbius3• 4 years ago

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31886850

james_in_the_uk3• 4 years ago

Alternative headline: Insufficiently clear IP releases mean AT&T not willing to take risk of distributing copyrighted music just to pad out a CD-ROM.

lukeh• 4 years ago

Yeah, I kinda agree here. Music licensing is complex and also likely unfamiliar to AT&T’s lawyers. It’s not unusual for signed musicians to be not 100% across their obligations on both the master and publishing sides (not saying that this was necessarily the case here, of course). At the very least even if the master was cleared, AT&T would likely have needed to pay mechanical royalties to the artists’ PROs or publishers.

lostgame• 4 years ago

I was happy to read[0] that the OS was indeed named after the so-bad-it’s-good cult film ‘Plan 9 From Outer Space’.

[0] http://catb.org/~esr/writings/taoup/html/plan9.html

dredmorbius3• 4 years ago

Correction: No, it's just bad.

Wonderfully, spectacularly, bad.

quickthrower2• 4 years ago

Because it just ain’t right burning a CD ROM and not filling it up

choppaface• 4 years ago

“And that, my friends, is why MP-3 took off instead of the far better follow-on system we were on the cusp of getting out the door.”

I dunno, maybe the technical problem from the beginning was distribution and installs and not actually compression. Maybe lawyers suck, but maybe Plan 9 was actually more for entertainment than anything else.

antonvs• 4 years ago

I rolled my eyes at that quote. People always have excuses for not finishing something.

pmarreck• 4 years ago

This is a literal tragedy

mdrzn• 4 years ago

"The Plan 9 CD-ROM needed about 100MB for the full distribution, if that."

I have no idea what they are talking about, what Plan 9 is, what is being distributed, why is AT&T involved, etc. Read the whole first post, still have no clue.

dredmorbius3• 4 years ago

Here's a handy guide to uncovering such information for yourself, and being able to write a TIL rather than an IHNFC:

TUHS is The Unix Heritage Society mailing list, which might offer you some cues as to context. There's a link at the top-right of the submitted link:

https://www.tuhs.org/mailman3/hyperkitty/list/tuhs@tuhs.org/

Rob Pike is Kind of A Big Deal in Unix, C (he's the Pike in Kernighan and Pike, a/k/a The UNIX Programming Environment (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Unix_Programming_Environme...)) The Go programming language, and a thing called Plan 9.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rob_Pike

Plan 9 From Outer Space was a so utterly bad it's ... well, just bad ... 1957 science fiction film.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plan_9_from_Outer_Space

Plan 9 from Bell Labs appropriated the name from the film for an operating system building on Pike's (and others') earlier experience developing Unix.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plan_9_from_Bell_Labs

You can download and install Plan 9 OS if you like: https://plan9.io/plan9/

Ten Thousand: https://xkcd.com/1053/

AT&T lawyer stopped Plan 9 release CD with songs by Lou Reed, Debbie Harry

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